Immersion Therapy: The Millions Interviews Ellen Forney

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On a two-page spread in her graphic memoir Marbles, Ellen Forney copies a partial list of artists and writers with “probable manic-depressive illness or major depression,” from Francesco Bassano to Anders Zorn, Antonin Artaud to Walt Whitman, Hans Christian Andersen to Emile Zola. There are plenty of people afflicted with mental illness who also happen to lack any artistic inclinations, but still, given such lists, one wonders: Is there a relationship between mental illness and genius? Peter Kramer fought that romanticism in his 2005 book Against Depression. “Like tuberculosis in its day, depression is a form of vulnerability that even contains a measure of erotic appeal,” he wrote in an accompanying essay in The New York Times Magazine, but the evidence that depression led to higher powers of perception, he claimed, was weak.

Still, Forney’s own battle with manic depression was shadowed by this concern. She had come to Seattle when she was in her early 20s hoping to make it as a freelance comic artist. She wanted to be brilliant, filled with heat, and thought that her clinical diagnosis of Bipolar 1 admitted her to “Club Van Gogh.” And she feared the neutering effect of medication. (It reminds you a little of Lisa Simpson’s ambitions to become a jazz musician. “I’ll avoid the horrors of drug abuse, but I do plan to have several torrid love affairs, and I may or may not die young. I haven’t decided.”) Forney’s highs could be wonderful, but also destructive, and her depths were terrible. Her chronicle of her fight is personable and unpretentious. She has her own insights into her battle, but her voice is not battle-weary.

We met for an interview in Seattle on May 31. She had recently returned from a trip to Sarajevo sponsored by the U.S. embassy where she discussed Sherman Alexie’s young adult novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which she illustrated, with Bosnian high school students. That book won a National Book Award. Marbles has been nominated for an Eisner.

The Millions: There’s a whole set of books, that are well-written and accessible, that a psychiatrist knows to give people to read. I imagine Marbles may become one of those books. What do you think Marbles as a graphic memoir can do that, for example, Darkness Visible can’t do?

Ellen Forney: I think that comics and the arts of painting and music offer a certain emotional quality, an emotional communication that a text doesn’t have. I’m not saying it’s better or worse. I’m saying it’s different. When the story is about mood or a set of moods, [then] having a picture, having a drawing style, having a visual representation of that…explains what [these different moods] feel like in a way that text just can’t. I also think that comics in general, for the most part, are approachable in a way that text isn’t.

TM: I always think of comics as a form of handwriting. When you get a letter that is handwritten, you have an idea of the body of the person who wrote that letter. Some of my favorite comics are a bit naïve, a bit rough, and appear unpolished even if they are carefully done. I think your comics appeal to that sensibility.

EF: It’s where my style naturally lands. The analogy that I make a lot when I look at someone’s very polished work [like] Dan Clowes or Charles Burns is a food analogy. Their work is like sushi. It’s so perfect, or if it is imperfect, it’s in a very perfect way. Whereas in my work, and I think we share that preference, is like lumpy oatmeal cookies that somebody baked. They have a very different appeal. It has an approachability. It has a different kind of emotional appeal. There’s a sense of conviction that’s different.

But I want to add one thing about handwriting. Without belaboring the point, I think it’s a travesty that so many cartoonists are turning to making a font out of their letters for exactly this reason. That feeling of a handwritten letter…Excuse me, I can’t remember how you put it.

TM: That you can imagine the body behind the hand doing the drawing.

EF: Right. And a sense of time in a way. When you see somebody’s handwriting, you know that there’s a span of time. There’s always that sense of feeling cheated when you compare all of the “a”s and they’re all the same. There’s something superficial about it. The letters don’t come together. I just feel that [handwriting] is far superior as far as storytelling [is concerned], as a method of communication in particular.

TM: When you are bipolar it’s very hard when you are in your depressive states to access the emotions of the high states and it’s also hard when you are in your high states to channel the emotions of your down states. I’m in a meditation group. One of the exercises we try to do is to access our unhappy emotions in order to see what they do to our bodies. And it’s very hard to do that on cue. And I imagine when you were composing your book it was very difficult to access these different states.

EF: I had a lot of material from that time specifically to draw from to jog my memory. I had years of journals. I don’t know how I would have done this without journals. The drawings I did in my journals I did when I was depressed. [I was also] talking with friends and people in my family about what I was like, which was extremely difficult, and just remembering, letting myself and making myself go there. It was really really difficult. It was a very thorough exposition of things that were anywhere from cringe worthy — a lot of the manic stuff was “ooh cringe” — to some extremely painful depressive stuff. And once you got there, you remember a lot more and it was really emotionally intense.

TM: When you were immersing yourself in those depressive states, were you afraid of accessing some memory that would trigger something in you that would return you to a place you couldn’t get back from?

EF: This is funny. Most people don’t ask me about this. [They’ll ask,] “Was it therapeutic for you?”

I felt like I was grounded. But I was extremely challenged. My psychiatrist was very much in touch with me, making sure I was staying steady. It was immersion therapy. I set up a tripod and posed for every panel. I was drawing myself crying and lying. I was so grateful towards the end that I wouldn’t have to keep setting [that up anymore]. I got a chair that looked like my psychiatrist’s chair. I realized I would have to be drawing that over and over. So I posed like my mother. I posed like my psychiatrist. And really, literally embodying these other characters, me and people who were around me, thoroughly immersing myself in that world and that time.

TM: I think Alison Bechdel used the same strategy when she made Fun Home.

EF: Yeah, she did. I think a lot of cartoonists use that. I think a lot of people think we draw out of our heads. And they think we’re not so good if we don’t draw out of our heads.

TM: This memoir is set at the time when you were writing I Was Seven in ’75 [a biographical strip about her childhood]. Do you see the symptoms of your bipolar disorder in the way I Was Seven in ’75 looks now?

EF: It was odd. I remember being manic and walking over to a table of people and asking them about what crossed pinkies meant for them. Does it mean if you say the same words at the same time or does it mean that you’re holding hands in a shy way? I was doing these spontaneous interviews.

TM: And you think that was a kind of mania.

EF: Not entirely. That’s in my personality even now. But I can remember there being an excitement and a heat behind it.

Some parts of the strip are really wordy — a lot of my work is really wordy — but it’s wordy in a way that I can recognize as being part of being revved. And I remember another point where I just did a lot of really literal drawings when I first got really depressed. At the end of a story about my dog there was just a drawing of me holding my dog. I think I even traced it from a photo. And I just couldn’t get very far thinking when I was in the depths. Yeah, in my first months when I was really depressed, that’s all I could really do. How I did that, I don’t actually know. Looking back, I don’t know how I managed to get this silly comic together.

TM: When you get diagnosed with a disorder of any sort you fear that your personality can be reduced to a few lines in a handbook. And nobody likes that. We all think of ourselves as being more idiosyncratic and interesting. Do you fear that some of your political beliefs, some of your sexual energy as evidenced in your book Lust [a collection of illustrated erotic personal ads she did for The Stranger], some of your personality can be reduced to this mental disorder?

EF: One of my fears for years in telling people that I was bipolar or coming out [as bipolar] when Marbles came out was that people that I knew or people I would meet would second-guess everything that I did, wondering if it was because I was bipolar. For myself, it’s impossible to distinguish between these different aspects. I know the things that I do that could be considered manic-y, or in the case of Lust, hyper-sexual by some. But I think [those things are] all a healthy part of me, my personality.

At the same time, I think that a lot of people will think of a mental disorder as being something other than themselves. Well, let’s see, not even mental disorders, but say, for example, someone was drunk. “That wasn’t me, that was the liquor talking or that was any sort of substance talking or that was the depressed me.” I think that it’s understandable [to say that]. But we also have to acknowledge that that’s part of us. That person who acted out when you were drunk…That was you. I don’t want to give anyone advice on their own identity, but I think it’s an important thing to think about.

That person who won the marathon. You’re not like that all the time. The person who fell off the curb. Well, of course you’re not like that all the time. But that was you and that was you.

TM: There’s a note of fear at the end of your book, that you’re managing what you have and you’re hoping that it stays managed, but you don’t know where it’s going to go. Do you feel if you were to relapse you would be responsible for writing a sequel?

EF: I wouldn’t have to tell any stories that I don’t want to tell. I didn’t feel that I had any responsibility to tell anything.

I mean I would do a [a story about a] relapse if it were a good story. I don’t know if that would be that interesting a story. I don’t know if that would be that interesting a sequel.

I’m looking forward to moving on.

Special thanks to Eric Reynolds of Fantagraphics for assisting in this interview’s preparation.

All images excerpted from MARBLES by Ellen Forney. Copyright (c) 2012 by Ellen Forney. Reprinted by arrangement with Gotham Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc.

Paul Morton
is a Ph.D. candidate in Cinema Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. His working dissertation focuses on the animation industry of the former Yugoslavia. He can be reached via email at [email protected]. You can read his blog My Thought-Dreams here.

There are lots of conversations in the world about writing which focus on the benefit of the reader and what works for him or her, and of course all writers should care about that, but at the same time, the magic act of making something out of nothing is happening in the writer’s head, and it’s that brain that needs to be tended to first.

Hannah Gersen’s writing has appeared in North American Review, The Southern Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Granta, and The New York Times, and she joined The Millions as a staff writer in 2013. At that time she had recently given birth to her first child, and she was at work on her first novel. It’s being published this month by William Morrow, a major New York house. Which is to say that writerly dreams do come true.

Home Field is set in the fictional town of Willowboro in western Maryland, a stand-in for the town Gersen moved to at the age of 10, after spending her early years in Maine and New Hampshire. The novel opens with teenage Stephanie and her stepfather Dean, the revered coach of the Willowboro High School football team, riding horses in the woods near his father’s Pennsylvania farm. They hear the “mew” of distant sirens. When they get back to the farm, they learn that Stephanie’s mother has hanged herself in one of the barns.

So Home Field is the story of how a man, his stepdaughter and his two young sons deal — and fail to deal — with monstrous grief. The novel is also a knowing portrait of how it feels for a girl to come of age, how it feels to live in a suffocating small town, and how difficult it is to see that the love we need most is usually right in front of us, awaiting our embrace. It’s a remarkably assured and un-showy first novel, the work of a young writer with immense poise and immense promise. So go ahead and accuse me of logrolling, but I asked Hannah Gersen if she would be willing to talk about her book, first novelist jitters, and other subjects with a fellow staff writer for The Millions. She agreed, and on a scalding morning we met over iced coffees in the back courtyard of a café near her home in the harborside enclave of Red Hook, Brooklyn.

The Millions: The first thing I want to ask you is, how do you feel right now? Are you having kittens?

Hannah Gersen: I’m really nervous about what people will think. Also, I’ve never had a very big audience before. It’s a much bigger audience than I’ve ever had, so I just don’t know what that will be like.

TM: Are you going to do a book tour?

HG: I’m reading in a couple of places — in Winchester, Va., in a little bookstore in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. I’m going to have a launch party down the street.

TM: Home Field is a family story. It’s about grief, it’s about a death in the family, how people cope with it or don’t cope with it. One of the things that really hit me was the fact that the writing is very un-fussy. I love that. So many first novelists do the “look-Ma-no-hands!” kind of writing. The writing here is very clear and clean. Did that just happen, or was it a conscious decision on your part to tone down the writing?

HG: Pretty conscious. I used to write a little fussier. I reread Anna Kareninaprobably 10 years ago — I had read it as a teenager and loved it – and I was surprised by how clear and calm the writing is, and there’s so much turmoil in that book. I thought, that’s how I want to write. I wanted that clarity and that calm because it made it easier to write about complicated things.

TM: Your novel is set in a small town in western Maryland. I lived for a time in a small town in Pennsylvania not far from there. You capture the sense of claustrophobia in a small town very beautifully. One of my favorite moments in the novel is when two teenagers are driving down the main street and they look into the video store and see one of their teachers going through the beaded curtain into the Adult section. That was so perfect! There are no secrets in a small town.

HG: You’re so anonymous here in New York, which is great. But I was remembering how different a small town was, how you really know people’s daily lives. As a kid, you see inside people’s houses. You’re babysitting, or you’re visiting your friends’ houses. You just have a much better sense of how other people live.

TM: Along those lines, there were sentences that were wonderful. Let me read a few to you: “Families were so strange. The trivial things you knew, the big things you didn’t. The two getting confused, one masquerading as the other.” That’s really the book, isn’t it?

HG: I was thinking about my own family — how I know little details about some of my relatives, but there are big holes in their life stories that I just don’t know. As a child you hear bits and pieces, and you put it together later as an adult. I’ve lost a lot of family members over the years, and there are questions I’ll never get to ask.

TM: You were born in Maine and moved to western Maryland as a young girl — so there is some autobiography in the novel. But it felt like a much bigger story than someone writing about herself. There’s an extended family and school and friends and in-laws, and a grandfather, who’s huge. Tell me about your decisions there.

HG: Moving to Maryland when I was 10 was a big deal. The culture was completely different from New England. Maryland is a mix of North and South, whereas New England is very northern. Northern manners, northern values. I remember the way people spoke to you on the phone in Maryland, it was completely different. In New England you get right to the point. In Maryland you’d have to chit-chat about the weather, how was your day? — and then you would say what you needed to say.

TM: It also takes half an hour to say goodbye.

HG: Exactly. Also, the emphasis on football was strange to me. My dad is a huge football fan, so it wasn’t completely foreign, but things were different — the weather, the plant life, the trees. We moved there in the year of the 17-year cicadas, these huge swarms of cicadas, and they’re so noisy — and I thought, where have I moved? It was almost tropical. But I loved it, too. I loved the wildlife. It was much more rural than where I’d lived.

TM: That was also where you took up long-distance running, which plays a big part in the novel. Did you get serious about it?

HG: Yeah, in middle school my gym teacher said I could be a good runner. Between middle school and high school I made an effort to learn how to run. It was hard and I was really bad the first year.

TM: Going back to small towns, you wrote a wonderful essay for The Millions a while back in defense of being pretentious. The list of things that you said were frowned upon when you were living in that small town in Maryland included “indie rock, foreign films, vegetarian diets, keeping your maiden name, bottled water, wearing black, drinking wine, drinking Starbucks coffee, reading The New York Times and doing yoga.” I laughed out loud when I read that. It sort of dates you because, as you said in the essay, those things are a lot more acceptable in small towns today. But that list tells about a time and a place. That was real, wasn’t it?

HG: Definitely. I remember this girl, she’d moved from a nice suburb in Maryland and she was carrying bottled water, and people thought it was so strange and pretentious. It’s so funny because now everyone carries bottled water everywhere.

TM: Speaking of indie rock, another thing I loved about the novel was the musical references. There’s a playlist at the back of the book where you talk about your reasons for including certain songs. Sometimes, in the novel, you just mention the artist and sometimes you mention specific song titles. Why did you include the music?

HG: Stephanie is a teenage character, and music is so important when you’re a teenager. Maybe I’m biased but I feel like music was really good in the early- to mid-’90s, in terms of rock music. Hip-hop was also interesting then, but that wasn’t really my thing.

TM: You were more into Tori Amos. She’s in the book.

HG: Yeah, and I knew it would be important to Stephanie and for other kids, too. I don’t know how kids listen to music now, but buying music, hanging out at stores, trading mix-tapes and CDs — it was a big way of making friends.

TM: You just wrote an essay for The Millions likening Bill Cunningham, the great street photographer for The New York Times, who just died — likening him to Proust. You wrote that Cunningham saw “the sublime in the everyday.” You’re a big Proust fan. Did you always think of Bill Cunningham as a Proust acolyte, or did that only come to you after he died?

HG: I’ve been reading Proust all year, and I’ve been noticing how good Proust was on clothing. I do think that Bill Cunningham’s sensibility about clothes was similar to Proust’s. He’s interested in how people wear clothes, and how it suits an individual, and how clothes express a time and place. He’s not about trends or celebrity. Proust wasn’t either. He viewed clothes as beautiful decoration — and expression.

TM: In your essay you mention Bill Cunningham talking about “summer fox,” that women in the 1920s wore fox collars in the summertime. Obviously he knew his history. That makes him a little Proust-like, doesn’t it?

HG: I think so. I was thinking he was probably familiar with some of the fashions that Proust wrote about.

TM: Tell me about how Home Field came to be. Did you work on it for 50 years, or did it come pretty quick?

HG: I started working on it when I was pregnant with my son. I didn’t have an easy pregnancy, so I didn’t make a lot of progress until after my son was born, in August of 2012. Then when my son was three or four months old I started writing again. Because I could only work on it when I had child care, I worked at a very steady pace, 15 hours a week pretty much. That actually worked pretty well because I had to step away from it.

TM: That’s not a bad thing, is it?

HG: No. I finished it around my son’s second birthday.

TM: So being the mother of a young child doesn’t have to kill your writing, does it?

HG: No. I’ve always had a day job, so right now being a mother is my day job — which is a much nicer day job.

TM: Tell me about the other day jobs.

HG: I worked as a secretary at a law firm for many years Very stressful. And I worked as a speechwriter for the Parks Department — a great job, I really liked that. I worked in a drug treatment center for a while, administering a grant at Samaritan Village in Queens. I worked at school for crafts in Maine for a few months because I had to get out of New York for a while. I worked in a hotel in Maine.

TM: You wrote another essay that was about what we’re talking about right here — that you have to fit the writing into the life, and you can accomplish a lot by doing a little bit of something every day.

HG: It’s true. I have much more faith than I used to that things will get done. I used to really worry about it a lot. But now, if I don’t finish something one day, then I’ll finish it the next day. That comes partly from being a parent, too. You see that your kid gradually acquires skills.

TM: So you’ve got to have the long view. That’s what novel-writing is, isn’t it?

HG: Yeah.

TM: Are you working on another novel?

HG: Yeah. I haven’t had a lot of time to work on it lately, and I’m dying to work on it. It’s much lighter in tone that this one. It’s a comic novel, I’d say. [Laughs.] That’s all I want to say.

TM: You’re living the dream. You’ve got a major New York publisher for your first novel. What would you say to young people like yourself who are struggling to do it?

HG: One of my mentors told me that everything takes longer than you expect, even if you have what you think of as a realistic expectation. I never thought I was going to publish in my 20s, or even my early-30s, but it still did take longer than I thought. I would keep that in mind. Also, the culture’s really focused on making money. You have to ignore it and think of enjoying your life, enjoying learning how to write better, enjoying reading, enjoying meeting interesting people, enjoying movies, listening to music, whatever inspires you. In New York it was hard, especially in my early-30s. A lot of my friends were finishing graduate degrees and going on to professional careers — not necessarily in writing, but as doctors and lawyers, and they had a very specific role. And I really didn’t. It’s hard.

TM: And fiction is becoming almost a boutique operation.

HG: It is. I guess it depends on your personality. For me, I’m barely breaking even, so I’ve decided it’s not worth worrying about. Writing is gratifying on a daily basis. If I didn’t love doing it, I would have stopped a long time ago.

In my household, Kate Christensen–the author of such sharp and fun novels as The Epicure’s Lament and The Great Man–is known as my husband’s second wife. I don’t mind; how can I fault my man’s impeccable taste? Christensen’s books are readable, the prose simultaneously unobtrusive and stylish, and her characters are deliciously flawed, rendered with humor and compassion. She’s a genius at depicting both losers and food in fiction (seriously, about the latter: I’ve cooked whole meals based on passages she’s written). After finishing her latest–and, in my opinion, her best–novel, The Astral (which is out today), I’ve decided thatI don’t want to be Christensen’s sister-wife…I want to marry her myself.

When The Astral opens, failed poet Harry Quirk has been kicked out of his home. His wife Luz mistakenly believes he’s having an affair with his best friend Marion, and she won’t listen to his defense. Over the course of the novel, Harry wanders around his long-time neighborhood of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, trying to reckon with his floundering present. Luz has destroyed his latest book of poems. His daughter, Karina, is a Freegan. His son, Hector, has been in the clutches of a cult. Harry has no money, no job, no woman to anchor his days. The novel, by turns funny, sad and wise, is glittering with insightful and lovely descriptions, and Harry is so far my favorite fictional character of 2011: he’s complicated, stubborn, smart, foolish, vulnerable, and–man oh man–does he feel real.

The Millions: One of my favorite aspects of your novel is Harry Quirk’s first-person narration. Perhaps because he’s a poet, he gets away with crystalline imagery and clever turns of phrase, while still maintaining a conversational, natural voice. I was especially taken with his lists of adjectives, such as this memory of his estranged wife, Luz: “In bed, naked with me, she was kittenish, sinuous, carnal, darling, ravenous, generous, selfish, laughing, violent, intimate, cooing, and soft.” God, that’s fun to type out, and read aloud! Can you speak a little about what went into developing Harry’s voice?

Kate Christensen: Generally, my first-person-narrator characters start talking to me, haunting my skull with their voices, which are not my own, like barflies hanging around yakking about themselves until closing time. And the only way to exorcise them is to start typing what they’re saying and keep going till they shut up. After 300 pages, give or take, they generally seem satisfied and go away, never to return. It keeps happening – there seems to be no cure. And it’s a pleasure to let someone else take over for a while. I get tired of the sound of my own thoughts. Harry took me around the neighborhood where I’d lived for the greater part of 20 years, most of my adult life, the neighborhood I had just left behind forever. His poetic take on the world allowed me to say a kind of lyrical, lingering goodbye to all the places I knew so well and the shed skins of past selves.

TM: One can’t separate this novel from its setting: contemporary Brooklyn, and, more specifically, Greenpoint, where Harry has spent most of his adult life. The novel is peppered with many terrific descriptions of place; take this one, for instance: “I went through the intersection at Greenpoint Avenue, the dingy McDonald’s, defeated Starbucks, opposing Arab newsstands, and onto the old Associated Supermarket with its sexy Polish girls pouting at nothing as they rang up your groceries.” (And, by the way, as a lass of Polish descent, I thank you for all this talk of sexy.) How does Brooklyn, and Greenpoint in particular, shape Harry’s character? I recently read that you now live in New England. Was it easier for you to write New York once you left it?

KC: In a word, yes. In fact, I was writing about a lot of things I’d recently left behind… among them Brooklyn, a long marriage, and an ancient, ongoing, panicky sense of failure. I wrote this novel about a middle-aged failed poet hieing himself around north Brooklyn, hungry and lonely and filled with regret, yearning, and nostalgia, when I was in the throes of new love, living in Tuscany and Rome and the White Mountains, with a contract for my sixth novel, feeling incredibly lucky, fulfilled, and safe. Harry manifested something internal, something at the core of all this good fortune – no matter what the reason or outcome, having a long, very loving marriage end is shockingly painful. It’s like a death in life. Harry could express a lot of the things I was feeling even as my life pressed on. He and I needed to dwell together in that raw state of disbelieving grief. Harry stayed in Greenpoint for me, faced it all, grappled and wrestled and tried to solve the insoluble mystery of the death of love.

TM: The jacket copy of the galley says that you know “what secrets lurk in the hearts of men.” Pray tell, what are these secrets, and how do you know them? You’ve written a number of wonderful male characters over the years (Hugo Whittier from The Epicure’s Lament is perhaps the most beloved and memorable antihero in contemporary fiction). Do you approach creating male characters any differently than you do female characters?

KC: If I do know some of men’s innermost secrets, it’s only because I share them. Men can be curmudgeons, horndogs, misanthropes, selfish, rebellious, crafty, mischievous, and so forth and still be loved – boys will be boys, their foibles and faults can be charming and funny — but girls are another story entirely. So I couch all my most antisocial, unacceptable, non-feminine tendencies in male voices. But my own Id is flying from the topmast.

TM: The women in the novel—Luz, Harry’s daughter Karina, Harry’s friend Marion (with whom Luz accuses him of having an affair), and even Christa, Harry’s son Hector’s cult leader —are powerful, competent, opinionated, and self-sufficient. The men, by contrast, strike me as quite lost. Was this intentional? Can you speak about this difference?

KC: It’s not a general statement about men and women by any means. One of the themes I’m exploring in The Astral is the ways in which certain women control, or try to control, other people – their husbands first and foremost, and their children, and in one case, their clients, and in another, their followers. Luz, Lisa, Christa, and Helen all tend to attract men who want to be controlled, who need it on some level, either because it’s what they’re used to from their own mothers or because they lack the internal wherewithal to direct the course of their own lives. There are clusters of relationships around these four women in the novel, all of which are defined by this dynamic.

It was interesting for me to explore this dynamic fictionally because I relate to it so little and always find myself empathizing with the men who fall into such women’s grasps. I’ve had my share of encounters with controlling women. There’s a mechanism at work in them that is deeply foreign to me and which I sought to expose. So yes, on this level, it was completely intentional.

Karina and Marion, on the other hand, are Harry’s gatekeepers, loyal and protective and generous. They seek connection and truth rather than control and power, and therefore serve as the counterpoints to the other female characters in the novel.

TM: Much of the novel is obsessed with the past, and Harry’s longing for a lost time: when his marriage seemed to work, when his kids were young, and his group of friends was intact, before Brooklyn was fully gentrified. Even Harry’s preferences as a poet, for old-fashioned formal structures, speaks of his nostalgia for something that has faded. When you set out to write the book, did you know that this would be a story of man looking backward, and seeing the past anew?

KC: From the opening sentences, Harry’s voice is steeped in the past. The germ of the novel was a man in late middle age, cast out of his home like an old Adam banished by his Eve from a comfortable, domestic Eden. The entire tenor of the book is shaped around this image of paradise lost, and Adam alone, humbled and brought low. His need to understand the past is intense and urgent; he’s a falsely-accused man hell-bent on proving his own innocence and discovering the actual perpetrator of the crime. The book was half inspired by Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth and half by the convention of detective noir in which the accused becomes the crime-solver by default, to clear his own name, and goes around interviewing anyone who can help him figure it out. Harry shambles around Greenpoint, hot on the trail of the cause of the death of love, inquiring and analyzing and picking up clues.

TM: I loved reading about Hector’s activities with the cult, which the book treats earnestly and compassionately, but not without a touch of humor as well—it’s hard not to laugh at people who rename themselves Lake and Bard. What kind of research, if any, did you do to write these sections? Just tell me: Have you ever been in a cult?

KC: No, I haven’t, but my little sister was in a group called the Twelve Tribes for many, many years. About ten years ago, my mother and then-husband and I planned an intervention; the group discovered that we were planning it and blocked it from happening. For several years, we read every book on the subject and met with ex-members and cult exit counselors and also with Steve Hassan, an ex-Moonie and cult expert whose Combatting Cult Mind Control is the most interesting, enlightening, helpful book I’ve ever read about how cults work and why people join them.

I think it’s very easy to satirize cults without any experience of them or education about them, to portray cult members as wacked-out zombies and the cults themselves as one-dimensional jokes. I know too much, have experienced too much, to do anything but treat the entire subject with the earnestness and compassion it deserves – and humor as well, which was one way of coping with the pain and sadness of losing my sister for so many years. (As an aside, she came out of the group with her husband and four children the same week I finished writing The Astral.)

TM: Because this is The Millions, I have to ask: What was the last great book you read?

I’d like to present to you a semi-regular column: Books & Mortar! Which will look at the fabulous world of tucked-away independent bookstores, a pulsating nationwide constellation of literary delights that, heaven forbid, you might walk past without knowing it’s there.

For instance, Key West, the southernmost point in the U.S., is the home of Jimmy Buffett, tarpon fishing, turquoise waters (and drinks), spring breakers, pirate stories, great Cuban food, and crazy-beautiful sunsets. But it also has a storied literary history, with residents including Elizabeth Bishop, Ralph Ellison, Tennessee Williams, Richard Wilbur, John Williams. It’s where Wallace Stevens famously attempted to punch Ernest Hemingway at the Sloppy Joe’s bar, with mixed results. And more recent writers have called Key West home: Ann Beattie, Tom McGuane, Joy Williams (also, her book The Florida Keys: A History and Guideis one of the most masterful works of travel writing that you’ll ever want to read).

And now it has Books & Books Key West, a locally owned independent that opened in 2016 and is also (voluntarily—haha) nonprofit. This 1,200 square foot store is housed and affiliated with The Studios of Key West, an arts and cultural organization that, among other things, runs an artists’ residency. Books & Books Key West thus also carries a terrific selection of art supplies.

Oh, and one of the cofounders and owners is someone you may have heard of: Judy Blume.

The Millions: What was the genesis of this amazing store?

Judy Blume:George [Cooper, Blume’s husband] and I wanted a full service indie bookstore in Key West. When we came to town 20 years ago there were five bookstores. Four years ago we were down to one used store. We tried to get Mitchell Kaplan of Books & Books, the great Miami area bookseller, to open a store in Key West. He wanted to but ultimately he couldn’t make the numbers work. Rents in Key West are very high and we’re more than three hours by car from Miami. Finally, Mitch said, “If you and George can find a way to make it work I’ll be there for you.” George is on the board of The Studios of Key West, a non-profit arts center who had just renovated a beautiful art deco building in Old Town with a 1200 square foot corner storefront. The perfect place for a non-profit indie bookstore! We (George) convinced the board of the Studios it was worth a shot. Everything happened so fast it feels like a dream when I look back. We opened in February 2016. I laugh now at how little we knew about running a bookstore. We learned on the job. We’re affiliated with Mitch’s stores but we’re non-profit and financially independent. We call Mitch’s Coral Gable store our “Mothership.” They do our buying (though we can order or reject any books we want.) They set up our store with handsome refurbished fixtures from one of their stores. Their staff came down for two weeks to set us up with our initial order and to train our staff, including George and me (we have three paid employees now) and our volunteers. During “season” our volunteers are especially important to us. They are great readers. One knows poetry. One worked in a bookshop in London. I miss them terribly when they leave for their summer homes but we are so lucky to have our three hardworking, loyal, friendly, fun employees. Our first season, George and I worked seven days. This past season we were able to take two days off a week, and we’re thinking of working four days a week next season.

TM: Does your bookstore have a mascot? A bookstore cat?

JB: The idea of having a bookstore cat is appealing but because we’re on a busy corner we’re concerned about any animal—cat or dog—running out into the street. One day, when we first opened, a hen came into the store. Chickens are protected in Key West and roam freely around town. We stayed calm, though we were thinking, OMG, if that chicken gets scared and starts flying around she’s going to poop on our books! Lucky for us, she wandered around, then with some gentle urging, walked out the way she walked in. Maybe she was looking for a good book? We leave our door open in nice weather. Customers bring in their own dogs. We keep a water bowl outside and treats by the register. This works best when it’s one dog at a time. Usually they ask if it’s okay and usually we say yes (if it’s a nice dog). So far only one has peed on our floor and the customer, a tourist, walked out before we knew it. Good our floor is concrete.

TM: What’s the most surprising thing you have found about being a bookseller?

JB: How much there is to learn, how hard you work every day, not just with customers but in the back room. The number of boxes that arrive weekly is staggering. We see our UPS delivery guys almost every day. Receiving new books and returning others (I had to learn to be tough because, as a writer, I never want to return books) takes us a huge amount of time. One of our two managers is always on that. Then there’s keeping up with the dusting. Everyone is expected to dust. If we had a cat, I’d give her a cloth, too. The time flies by. I usually go home exhausted but very happy and can’t wait to go back again the next day.

TM: You and your husband George are co-founders. How do you divide up the duties?

JB: I’m on the floor, chatting with customers, helping them find the right books, even working the register (not my strong point but I’m very proud of what I’ve learned to do). Every day I “pet” the books, move them around, change the window displays. Tuesdays are “new book” days. That’s when I get to put out the books that are date-sensitive, which means moving around all the books on the new and notable table.

George is in the office most of the time. He’s our CFO, making sure it’s all going well. And so, far, fingers crossed, it’s been a success.

TM: Authors are beginning to open up bookstores all over the place: Louise Erdrich in Minneapolis, Ann Patchett in Nashville. Larry McMurtry is a long-time bookstore proprietor. Do you think you’re part of a trend?

JB: I didn’t know about all the authors opening bookstores when we started, but it’s good news!

TM: What’s a day in the life of Judy Blume, bookseller like?

JB: Rush, rush, rush—to get to the store. We’re open 10 to six, seven days a week. I ride my bike unless it’s rainy. Tuesdays and Thursdays I come directly from the gym. When we opened the store, we thought our customers would be 75 percent locals and snowbirds, and 25 percent tourists. In fact, it’s about 80 percent tourists and 20 percent locals. The tourists have been great. They sometimes buy a stack of books and send them home. They ask for restaurant recommendations. And they’re always—always—thrilled to be in Key West. Of course we love our locals, too. So there’s a lot of chatting about books, Key West, and whatever else is on their minds. By the end of the day I’m exhausted (or did I say that already?). All I want is to eat dinner and go to bed.

TM: Do people freak out when they find out the lovely woman who just hand-sold them a novel is the beloved Judy Blume?

JB: Yesterday a couple came in and George and I were chatting with them about their used bookstore in another Florida city. George (that devil) asked if they carried Judy Blume books and before I could stop them from answering, always afraid they’ll say something like—I would never carry those books!—she said “Oh yes, a lot.” At which point I said, “I’m Judy”—and she was so taken aback I was worried she might faint. But all ended well. In the beginning, before there was so much publicity, people did freak out. Once I had to prove who I was by showing the customer my photo on the back of In the Unlikely Event. She studied it, studied me (I admit I was having a bad hair day and I’m often red-eyed and itchy nosed from something—the books, the dust, the building? It was clear she didn’t believe me and I was sorry I’d gotten into the conversation in the first place. Now, people come in because they’ve heard it’s my store. The trolleys, the tour buses, the concierges at the hotels, all let them know about Books & Books @ the Studios. And we’re grateful. George and I joke that I’m the Southernmost (everything in Key West is the “southernmost”) Shamu. You know, have your photo taken with Shamu (remember the whale, the one time star of Sea World?) Because we’re a non-profit, I don’t do photos unless the customer is actually buying something. It doesn’t have to be my book but it has to be something. People have been very understanding. Still, it embarrasses me to have to tell a customer our rules.

TM: What’s the best kind of bookstore customer?

JB: Anyone who’s friendly, loves to read, and finds a book or three to buy. Or maybe it’s a young person who says she doesn’t like to read who leaves the store with her nose in a book.

TM: The worst?

JB: Let’s say the most challenging. That would be a customer who wants a certain book but can’t think of the title or the author’s name. The cover is blue, or has a spot of blue, or maybe the type is in blue. She/he will think it’s new, will remember seeing it on our table last week, but it could have been she/he has just read about it. We’ll go around together looking at all the places that book might be. Sometimes we’ll actually find it. Hallelujah!

TM: What book do you want to tell the world about right now?

JB: Right now it’s What to Do About the Solomons, by Bethany Ball, a first novel I loved. It’s funny, sexy, and original. I’m also talking up Edgar and Lucy, by Victor Lodato. Emily (one of our managers) and I both loved it. And, of course, my favorite book of the year, The Nix, by Nathan Hill. You don’t want to miss this debut novel. George agrees.

TM: Are there other staff who are also writers?

JB: George has published two non-fiction books, both based on historical crimes. He’s a big help when someone wants a non-fiction book on a certain subject. That’s because he’s a reader. It’s more important to have staff who know and love books than staff who writes them.

TM: One of the great things about a bricks-and-mortar store is not only the individualized book picks, but also the author events. What were some of the fun ones this year?

JB: We had our first big events between January and April this year. Jami Attenberg, Kay Redfield Jamison, Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt. We had kids’ authors Meg Cabot and Rachel Vail. Since summer is our slow season we won’t have any more events until next fall/winter.

TM: What’s a favorite bookstore—NOT YOUR OWN?

JB: We visit bookstores wherever we go these days. In Santa Fe we’re fans of Collected Works. But, of course, our absolute favorite is Books & Books in Coral Gables. And their food (they have a cafe) is scrumptious!

I quickly realized that the danger isn't going too far, it's not going far enough. If you're going to borrow from Lewis, you have to travesty him, openly poke fun at him, say something about him. Anything less and readers will see your allusions as merely plagiarism.

Next up in our series of interviews with lit-mag editors is Yasmine Alwan, co-founder of the Brooklyn-based Tantalum. Yasmine, an old colleague of mine from NYU, is herself a talented fabulist whose work has appeared in such well-regarded publications as NOON. After earning her M.F.A., Yasmine started Tantalum with her pal Cynthia Nelson. The first issue, with a handsome letter-pressed cover from Red Hook’s Ugly Duckling Presse, features experimental prose with an emphasis on language, in the great tradition of Gertrude Stein and Samuel Beckett. Contributors include Leslie Scalapino, Sara Marcus, and Martha Ronk.The Millions: What possessed you to start your own literary magazine? How did the first issue come together?Yasmine Alwan: The why right now is entirely personal. I had never thought to start a magazine – in fact I thought quite the opposite, “why should I when there are so many out there” – when a professor of mine, Lytle Shaw, talked about what it had meant for him to start a magazine (which was Shark) and how it had opened a new […] space to write into, from, toward (these are my words; he had much better ones). Also, I remember once Robert Fitterman answering a question about the danger of a small or “exclusive” readership, and he said something to the effect of how he wasn’t necessarily worried about his readership, because he felt like it was always being “made” by his work and surrounding people’s work. That struck me as a profound point, relievedly moving against what I hear some writers talking about, worrying about their work complying to market dictates and wanting market attentions. […] The idea of making an audience or rather a community to write to and with was striking, thrilling.TM: How does Tantalum distinguish itself in a crowded marketplace?YA: There’s such a multiplicity of prose writing out there and what can occur in the name of prose seems to me to be limitless. “Fiction,” even, is a word that makes me feel restless because it is burdened by familiar codes of representation of reality, time, character etc. It seems to me that I can turn in many directions and get a confirmation on my expectations, but that is exactly what I don’t want in terms of prose – that satisfaction upon “delivery” of the familiar. I would rather read something that asks me to take it apart or for which I have to take myself apart a little bit. You could also say I am engaged by prose that is highly sensitive to language or organized around it, although the fictions in Tantalum are driven by a wider range of engagements (image, sound, concepts, appropriations, character, metafictional thoughts, etc.). When soliciting, we tried to leave the map open.TM: How do you support the endeavor, economically?YA: I just paid for it myself. I hope to gain access to grant money for the next round. […] Although my starting Tantalum right now is just idiosyncratic timing, there is a wide upwelling of DIY publishing happening these days. I think it born out of the shifts in megapublishing and the ways in which some people are shrugging off the expectation of publishing via traditional means. It’s really quite exciting.(Our literary magazine roundtable concludes on Friday, with an interview with one of the editors of [sic]. We encourage our readers to leave comments below on the state of the literary magazine. Do you read lit-mags? Why or why not? What do you look for in a litmag? What are your favorites? And so on…)Parts 1 & 3